The present invention relates generally to the field of computers, and more particularly to password-recovery.
Often, systems require security questions or challenge questions for password reset, to confirm a person's identity, or to assist in authenticating a user. Such systems (e.g., GMAIL and numerous other web sites) may ask a security question, such as a user's mother's maiden name. Then, the user may supply the correct answer, but only later realize that this information is readily available on the Web and therefore, is easily accessible for the public to obtain. As such, a user may wish to supply a “lie” regarding such a challenge question, in an effort to make the response more secure. However, over time, a user can easily forget such lies, as they are idiosyncratic to the cognitive context in which the lie was formulated. Similarly, if a user later wishes to change a valid answer to a lie, the user may become worried that he or she can never determine a useful way to remember the lie, especially if more than one site has asked this challenge question over the years and the user may have lied for some sites, not lied in others, or lied differently on different sites.